I post about a variety of things: programming, urban homesteading, python, HCI, women in tech, conferences, Aspergers, neurodiversity, whatever catches my attention.
I also post raw emotional and psychological "processing", to provide a glimpse into the mind of a female Aspie geek.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Status Expectations and Gender

This is a repost of something I wrote for a women-only mailing list so that I can point to it publicly. Many workplace and other community issues between genders may be related to Status Expectations on interactions. Here I try to summarize some current sociological theory on gender:

Subconscious beliefs about status affect our expectations when we interact:*Lower status people are expected to be less competent than higherstatus people, by default.*Lower status people are viewed as having less "legitimate" claims to authority.* Finally, the higher status person is expected to act authoritative(decisive, proactive) and the lower status person is expected to act"communally" (working to ease social relations, inclusive, considerateof others, reactive, etc)

When two people interact in a situation, these expectation color ourperceptions and interactions, so, for example, the higher statusperson is given "the benefit of the doubt" and their skills,behavior, outcomes are judged less harshly than the lower statusperson. The lower status person's skills are judged more harshly(mistakes are evidence of their lower competence, while successes aredownplayed - is this sounding familiar to anyone?), and any attempt bythe lower status person to act authoritative is viewed as anillegitimate power play. The lower status person doesn't have "theright" to act authoritative.

Women are lower status than men (in contemporary US society, and inmany/most contemporary societies.) While education and experience canincrease our perceived status regarding competence, we are stillviewed as not having "legitimate" claim to authority. In other words,women can be competent, but we still have to "be nice" otherwise,we're violating what it means to be a woman (in contemporary USsociety, "being a woman" includes "being nice".) Women are perceived(rightly or wrongly) as having higher social skills than men, we areheld to higher standards on social skills than men (because we arelower status).

Unfortunately, (white) women were socialized with the same statusexpectations as men, so we hold these same expectations when we walkinto a situation. (There is some evidence that African American womenhave different status expectations when interacting within a group ofAfrican Americans - but share the hegemonic beliefs when interactingin mixed racial groups.) We assume the man is more competent bydefault (unless we have some reason to believe otherwise, such ashigher education), and we assume the man will be in charge (again,unless we walk in with a higher "rank".)

snip of a description on the mailing list of being seen as "difficult"

This is the problem of how the lower status person is supposed to getahead - they're perceived as less authoritative, so they don't getpromoted to positions of authority, but if they act authoritative,they are violating norms, and are not promoted because of their"inappropriate behavior". (Yes - it is a double standard and a seriouscatch22.) Women fall afoul of this regularly (the glass ceiling ispartly based on this effect.)

Women who *do* get ahead, often are the ones who were able to smoothruffled feathers by "being helpful" and playing on their social skillsstrengths, to get the men to accept them as peers. At that point, theyare sometimes able to act more authoritatively without it being viewedas "illegitimate". It's hard to accept this, though, as not justcontinuing the stereotypes and reinforcing them. Either way, it's anugly tangled knot. Do we act "nice" to get along and perpetuate thestereotypes? or do we act "authoritative" to get ahead, and run therisk of being stuck in a position where we're not allowed to advancebecause we're viewed as "too bitchy"? Ugh.